Jimmy Carter’s painting of his family’s blacksmith shop in Archery, Ga., where he grew up.

Jimmy Carter’s painting of his family’s blacksmith shop in Archery, Ga., where he grew up.

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Jimmy Carter discusses book, race and Willie Nelson’s love of pot

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When Jimmy Carter nearly bounds out of a hotel armchair to greet a journalist, it’s refreshing to see that the 90-year-old former president has not been passing the time — like so many of us these days — deep in a smartphone. Instead, he’s holding a book, a murder mystery by P.D. James.

Carter has been an avid reader all his life, and he is certainly no stranger to the written word. He has just published his 29th book, “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety” (Simon & Schuster; 257 pages; $28). It’s a sweeping and often tender overview of his life in which he guides readers through his hardscrabble boyhood in the mostly African American community of Archery, Ga. (where he was raised in a Sears, Roebuck house and worked on the family farm), his time in the Navy (where Harry Truman’s order to end discrimination in the armed forces was “accepted with equanimity” — unlike what he witnessed at home), and, of course, his presidency and remarkably prolific post-presidency as a tireless activist. The book also includes some of his poetry and paintings; he recently finished a 30th book, a self-published collection of his art, which he took up in the Navy.

Carter lives in Plains, Ga., about two miles from Archery. He spoke about his book and current affairs on a one-day visit to San Francisco. His answers have been edited for length.

Q: It’s late July, a quieter time in the publishing world, and yet here you are traveling around the country on a book tour. Is this your idea of a vacation, sir?

A: No, I don’t mind. I’ve done it before. My wife and I go fly fishing to Russia, Argentina, New Zealand and places like that. But we don’t go on vacation very much. We travel a lot for the Carter Center. We have programs in about 80 countries in the world. We have 35 of those countries in Africa, and we go there quite often. And this year we’ve been to Saudi Arabia, to meet with the king, and to Dubai and to Qatar, to meet with Hamas and the leaders there, and to Israel and the West Bank.

Q: Is that all?

A: No, that’s not nearly all. (Laughs.)

Q: You’ve published memoirs, a novel, poetry, a children’s book. Is there any other genre of writing that you’d like to tackle?

A: I’ve done just about all of the genres, I guess, because I’ve done history and biography, and as you say, a novel, poetry. Twenty-nine books in all. But I do it for two reasons. One is to make a living — I’m not on the lecture circuit, I don’t serve on corporate boards and things like that. So it’s my major source of income, and we have a very large family that we help support.

And then it gives me the chance to address issues that are important to me and spread my message around this country, primarily, and the rest of the world. My most recent book — last year — was about the abuse of women and girls in the world, which is a major commitment of the Carter Center. We have a heavy emphasis on human rights, and for the last three years we’ve been working on that issue — not to the exclusion of everything else. This coming year, we’ll treat about 71 million people for terrible diseases that no longer exist in the halfway-developed world. And they are primarily in Africa and in Latin America.

And we do [monitor] elections to bring democracy and freedom to people. We’ve just finished our 100th troubled election, in May. That was in Guyana. And we’ll be going to Sierra Leone and Myanmar.

Q: You write in your book that growing up, you were a voracious reader. What were your favorite books as a child?

A: My schoolteacher, Miss Julia Coleman, had about 100 books in our library that she had on a list. And I think I’m maybe the first and only student to have read all 100 of them. I read “War and Peace” when I was about 12 years old, I remember that. And my father had a fairly good library. Tarzan books and, you know, boys’ books. Indian lore, I was always interested in that. So I read pretty voraciously when I was a child.

Q: You do write about your father seeing you lying across a stool and reading a book when you were about 10. You heard him tell your mother, “I reckon that boy’s enjoying his books while the rest of us go to the field.” What effect did that have on you? Did it strengthen your resolve to keep reading?

A: No. (Laughs.) It almost turned me against reading. I was really avid for my father’s approbation. And that was an indication to me that my father was quite disappointed in me. I had been out of the field for three or four days because my right wrist had swollen and I couldn’t bend my arm. I couldn’t flex my fingers.

Q: I’m guessing that, like a lot of Americans, and Southerners in particular, you’re fond of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Have you read her second book, “Go Set a Watchman?”

A: No, and I probably won’t. I’d rather stay with “To Kill a Mockingbird.” There’s been some speculation that this book was a first draft, and when she presented it to early publishers or knowledgeable people, that they turned it down, and she rewrote it to make it more idealistic, more compatible with the dream of Southerners to correct the problem.

Q: Does that change your perception of “Mockingbird”?

A: Not really. I think it still was a dramatically effective presentation of what the South could be.

Q: What’s the last poem you wrote?

A: I don’t really remember. I keep drafts of my poems in my study, and every now and then I have an idea to write a poem. One of the last ones I wrote was about the plethora of human rights abuses of women. I’ve written other books about human rights abuses. But when I feel something very intensely or deeply or personally, I can go to extremes of self-expression or self-analysis by writing a poem — more than I can just talking to somebody or writing prose.

Q: How do the poems come to you?

A: Well, sometimes I just have a feeling. One poem in my book is about my favorite dog dying, and I wrote that when I still had tears in my eyes. That’s a favorite for a lot of people.

Q: What are you reading now that you like?

A: I just got this when I was in Denver. [Holds up a copy of P.D. James’ novel “A Certain Justice.”] The people at Tattered Cover, which is my favorite bookstore in the nation, when I asked them if they had a recent P.D. James, they gave me a whole stack of P.D. James. I finished another book on the Kindle yesterday. It was a book by a Norwegian writer, an exciting murder mystery called “The Snowman” [by Jo Nesbo].

Before that I read the autobiography of Willie Nelson, who’s my buddy. Willie Nelson used to be a running partner of mine. He was a darn good athlete, by the way. I think he had four letters in high school. He still was an avid runner when I was in the White House. So he would spend the night with me on occasion at the White House, and as he said in his autobiography, he smoked pot on the roof. [Laughs.]

Q: You stayed downstairs?

A: I did, yeah. He concealed his true partner and claimed that he was smoking with one of the servants at the White House, which was not exactly true. [Laughs.] It’s an interesting book. He extols marijuana throughout the book, that he tried beer and tried whiskey and tried harsher drugs, but he settled on marijuana as the one that was for him.

Q: While we’re on the subject, what do you think of the direction the nation has taken, state by state, at least, as far as marijuana is concerned?

A: Well, I’ve commented on this a lot. In 1979, I made a major speech and I called for the decriminalization of marijuana. And it was well-received. When I was governor, we had a contest among southeastern governors, at least, to see who could have the smallest prison population. And so we decided among ourselves not to put people in prison for the possession of marijuana but to offer treatment for people who had an addiction. So when I was president, we evolved a nationwide policy, and that was one of the premises.

But at that time, we had one person per thousand who was in prison in America. A hundred people per hundred thousand. Now we have 750 people per hundred thousand. We have seven and a half times as many people in prison. And we have eight times as many black women in prison now as we did in 1981, when I left the White House. So that’s been one of the major concerns I’ve had as a non-lawyer, to criticize the American justice system, which is highly biased against black people and poor people. And it still is.

But I think there’s an awakening now of a realization that we too early congratulated ourselves on the end of racial prejudice and white supremacy. And that was a feeling that we had when I was president, that we had pretty much overcome that problem.

Q: To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, are we better off now than when you were president?

A: I don’t think so. You know, I think we had kind of a commitment back in those days for equity among people that we don’t have now. I think with the advent of Reagan, and subsequently, both parties, there’s been a strong move towards the advantage given to the richer people, in taxation and grants and supplements and things of that kind. Primarily exacerbated more recently by the Supreme Court’s stupid ruling on Citizens United, and now there’s a massive flood of money into the political system that I think has subverted the essence of a moral and ethical standard that used to permeate American democracy. Now it’s not an admirable process. I think we’ve gone backwards.

John McMurtrie is the book editor of The San Francisco Chronicle. Twitter: @McMurtrieSF